This invention generally pertains to social networking, and more specifically to specifying criteria for generating stories sponsored by an advertiser.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. These social networking systems allow users to communicate information more efficiently. For example, a social networking system user may post contact information, background information, job information, hobbies, and/or other user-specific data to a location associated with the user on a social networking system. Other users can then review the posted data by browsing user profiles or searching for profiles including specific data. Social networking systems also allow users to associate themselves with other users, creating a web of connections among the users of the social networking system. These connections among the users can be leveraged by the social networking system to provide more relevant information to each user in view of user-specific interests.
Social networking systems typically include a system for connecting users to content most likely to be relevant to different users. For example, a social networking system may group users according to one or more common attributes in their profiles, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, or other attributes. Users of the social networking system or external parties, such as advertisers, can then use these groups to customize information delivery based on properties of the groups to increase the likelihood that users in a group receive information of interest.
Advertisers have attempted to leverage information about social networking system users by using information from the social networking system to target advertisements (“ads”) to different users. Commonly, an advertiser identifies user characteristics to the social networking system, which identifies users having one or more of the characteristics and serves an ad from the advertiser to the users having at least one of the characteristics. For example, an advertiser identifies users with an affinity for a band and a location near a venue where the band is performing, and the social networking system presents banner advertisements for the band's concert to users having the identified information in their profiles.
Additionally, social networking systems may allow advertisers to sponsor stories informing a social networking system user of actions taken by other users. Such a “sponsored story” seeks to increase user interaction by providing more personalized information to a user based on actions taken by social networking system users. For example, if a viewing user is connected to an additional user who has “liked” an advertiser's fan page, the advertiser may sponsor a story that is communicated to the viewing user indicating that the additional user has “liked” the page. However, advertisers currently have limited ability identify sponsored stories for communication to other users. This limits the ability of advertisers to flexibly and effectively promote user actions based on the information available within the social networking system.